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cf. https://bibliothecaveneficae.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/the_letters_of_j.rrtolkien.pdf

176 From a letter to Naomi Mitchison 8 December 1955

I had to deliver the opening lecture of the newly-founded O'Donnell Lectures in Celtic Studies
– already overdue: and I composed it with 'all the woe in the world', as the Gawain-poet says of the
wretched fox with the hounds on his tail. All the more woe, since I am the merest amateur in such
matters, and Celtic scholars are critical and litigious; and more woe since I was smitten with
laryngitis.
I think poorly of the broadcast adaptations. Except for a few details I think they are not well
done, even granted the script and the legitimacy of the enterprise (which I do not grant). But they
took some trouble with the names. I thought that the Dwarf (Glóin not Gimli, but I suppose Gimli
will look like his father – apparently someone's idea of a German) was not too bad, if a bit
exaggerated. I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations,
speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.....
I have now got a pestilent doctorate thesis to explore, when I would rather be doing something
less useful.....
I am sorry about my childish amusement with arithmetic; but there it is: the Númenórean
calendar was just a bit better than the Gregorian: the latter being on average 26 secs fast p. a., and
the N[úmenórean] 17.2 secs slow.

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cf. https://tolkienbystump.quora.com/Tolkien-s-1965-Interview

“Now Read On” on December 16, 1970 at 9:00 p.m. (replayed on the 17th at 3:45 p.m.) (see Now Read On - BBC Radio 4 FM - 16 December 1970 - BBC Genome), and so people have been led to believe that the broadcast contained a new interview, when it did not. The 1964 date comes from the fact that Gueroult ran a “practice” interview with Tolkien on November 26, 1964. Any audio labeled as being from 1964 is mislabeled and is from the 1965 interview. I can only guess that “1971” is nothing but a case of confusion as to the broadcast date of “Now Read On.”


Denys Gueroult: Have you a particular fondness for these comfortable homely things of life that the Shire embodies: the home and pipe and fire and bed—the homely virtues?

J.R.R. Tolkien: Haven't you? [laughs]

Gueroult: Haven't you Professor Tolkien?

Tolkien: Yes, of course! Yes, yes, yes.

Gueroult: You have a particular fondness, then, for hobbits?

Tolkien: That's where I feel at home…look, the Shire is very like the kind of world in which I first became aware of things, very like. Which was perhaps more poignant to me because I wasn't born in it. I was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. I was very young when I got back, but at the same time it bites into your memory and imagination, even if you don’t think it has. If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus, and if you're normally troubled by heat and sand, then, to have just at the age when imagination is opening out, suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village, I think it engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midlands English countryside based on good water, stones, and elm trees and small quiet rivers and so on, and, of course, rustic people about.

Gueroult: At what age did you come to England?

Tolkien: I suppose it was when I was about three and a half. Pretty poignant of course, because, you see, one of the things why people say they don’t remember is it’s like constantly photographing the same thing on the same plate. Slight changes simply make a blur. But if a child has had a sudden break like that, it’s conscious. What he tries to do is to fit the new memories onto the old. I’ve got a perfectly clear vivid picture of a house that I now know is in fact a dutifully worked out pastiche of my own home in Bloemfontein and my grandmother's house in Birmingham. Because I can still remember going down the road in Birmingham and wondering what had happened to the gallery, what happened to the balcony. So consequently, I do remember things extremely well. I can remember bathing in the Indian Ocean when I was not quite two, and I remember it very clearly.

Gueroult: Let me turn to another subject for a moment. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo accepts the burden of the Ring, and he embodies, as a character, the virtues of long suffering and perseverance, and by his actions one might almost say in the Buddhist sense he ‘acquires merit’. He becomes, in fact, almost a Christ figure. Why did you choose a halfling, a hobbit, for this role?

Tolkien: I didn’t. I didn't do much choosing, I wrote The Hobbit you see…all I was trying to do in The Lord of the Rings was to carry on from the point where The Hobbit left off. However, I’d got hobbits on my hands, hadn’t I?

[There is some confusion about what follows here. It appears that in the clips that played in 1970, Gueroult performed some heavy editing to clarify the muddled nature of the conversation that ensued after Gueroult compared Bilbo to Christ. He seems to have added a new question and used other audio of Tolkien to convey the same information in a much more concise way: “G: Indeed, but there’s nothing particularly Christ-like about Bilbo. T: Oh no, no, no.” It seems to make little sense that Gueroult would immediately clarify that Bilbo was not like Christ when he himself, and not Tolkien, had immediately before made the comparison. The below appears to be the original thread of the conversation.]

Gueroult: It seemed to me strange that this small hobbit from a small and comfortable Shire…

Tolkien: [breaking in] I shouldn’t say that he was Christ-like, I think…personally. But he of course he has some of the features of Christ. I guess the accepting of a burden…

Gueroult: Perhaps I’ve exaggerated. But in the face of the most appalling danger he struggles on and continues and wins through.

Tolkien: But that seems, I suppose, more like an allegory of the human race. I've always been impressed that we’re here surviving because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds: jungles, volcanoes, wild beasts. They struggle on, almost blindly in a way. Frodo had very little idea, really. Of course, by the time he’d come to the end of his quest, he was beginning to understand that he was very much more. I thought the wisest remark in the whole book was that where Elrond says that the wheels of the world are turned by the small hands while the great are looking elsewhere, and they turn because they have to, because it’s their daily job.

[The “Midgard” section is played here in the 1970 broadcast, while the 27-minute clip skips directly from Tolkien’s allegory to the “principles of the races.” It is certainly plausible that it belongs here, considering that the 1970 broadcast runs from the allegory to “Midgard” to the races in sequence and that the 27-minute clip skips a segment similar in size at the end of the interview. If not here, it is quite difficult to say where “Midgard” belongs. There is no obvious place for it later on, and a good portion of the interview is theoretically missing from the beginning. So, it has been placed here based on only the one piece of evidence available.]

Gueroult: I thought that conceivably Midgard might be Middle-earth or have some connection?

Tolkien: Oh, it is; they're the same word. Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of Earth or is another planet of the science-fiction sort, but it's simply an old-fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the ocean.

Gueroult: It seemed to me that Middle-earth was, in a sense, as you say, “this world we live in”, but this world we live in at a different era.

Tolkien: No, at a different stage of imagination…yes.

Gueroult: Did you intend in The Lord of the Rings that certain races should embody certain principles: the elves, wisdom; the dwarves, craftsmanship; men, husbandry and battle, and so forth?

Tolkien: I didn’t intend it, but when you’ve got these people on your hands, you’ve got to make them different, haven't you? Well, of course, as we all know, ultimately, we've only got humanity to work with. It's the only clay we've got. In the end, of course, any races you make, if they’re speaking and thinking, are taking certain parts of humanity as one knows it. Slight alterations and emphasis, that’s all you can do, isn’t it? Because the elves are simply, in a sense, the expression of certain, not really wholly legitimate, desires the human race has about itself. We should all, or at least a large part of the human race, would like to have greater power of mind, greater power of art, by which I mean that the gap between the conception and the power of execution should be shortened; we should like that, and we should like longer time, if not indefinite time, in which to, to go on knowing more and making more. Therefore, we make the elves immortal, in a sense. I had to use ‘immortal’, I didn’t mean that they were eternally immortal, merely that they are very longeval and their longevity probably lasts as long as the inhabitability of the Earth. The dwarves, of course, are quite obviously, couldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic. There’s a tremendous love of the artifact, and of course the immense warlike capacity of the Jews, which we tend to forget nowadays. Hobbits are just more rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the, in general, small reach of their imagination—not the small reach of their courage or latent power.

Gueroult: How did The Lord of the Rings develop from The Hobbit? Because clearly, it developed.

Tolkien: Oh yes, because The Hobbit was successful, naturally, I was pressed for a sequel. I looked for the only point in it that showed signs of development. So I thought to choose the Ring as the key to the next story. That’s the mere germ, of course, yes. [They went soft?] if you’re going to make a…I wanted to make a big story. I felt…got to be the ring. No, it’s not a magic ring. I invented that little rhyme, I remember, in my bath one day.

Gueroult: Now this germ actually, of course, is also present, isn’t it, in many mythologies? I mean in Scandinavian mythology, there are ‘rings of power’, are there not?

Tolkien: Yes, yes there are, yes.

Gueroult: It’s guarded by dragons, is it not, in Germanic legend?

Tolkien: The ring, yes.

Gueroult: I suppose Smaug might be interpreted as being a sort of Fafnir, is he?

Tolkien: Oh yes, very much so—except no. Fafnir was a human being, you see. Or a being, humanoid with a big, a toothless form, whereas Smaug is pure intelligent lizard.

Gueroult: [amused] You have a fondness for intelligent lizards.

Tolkien: Well, dragons always attracted me as a mythological element. They seem to be able to comprise human malice and bestiality together so extraordinarily well, and also a sort of malicious wisdom, a shrewdness—terrifying creatures.

Gueroult: Asking how The Lord of the Rings began leads on to this question: did you…

Tolkien: It grew, and grew without control…

Gueroult: ‘Without control’, this is the point: you did not have a scheme.

Tolkien: No, no.

Gueroult: No outline at all.

Tolkien: Well, except, that was a major one, that the Ring had got to be…

D. Gueroult: I mean, did you know the Ring had to be destroyed, from the beginning?

Tolkien: Oh yes, yes, yes. That, you see, because Gandalf says that quite early. Therefore, at some point or other, a hobbit at some point has got to make his way to the Cracks of Doom, obviously. That’s the only thing. And several times, I tried to write that last scene ahead of time; it never came…it didn’t come out; it never would. Always had to wait for it to come through.

Gueroult: Did you decide, right at the beginning, that Gollum was to play such a part, or did you go back through the book after and write in the various linking parts of Gollum?

Tolkien: You couldn’t get Gollum out, could you? You think of Gollum’s relation to the Ring; if the Ring was going to be important, then the Gollum business must have been important. I liked him better than all the other characters and am much more sorry for him.

Gueroult: But, you see, this is interesting, because he’s practically the only grey character, with the possible exception of Boromir, right through the book.

Tolkien: And Denethor, yes.

Gueroult: And Denethor, yes. The others are almost completely black and white.

Tolkien: They all have their temptations, actually.

Gueroult: They all have their temptations, but nevertheless, the moment you’ve established your character, your reader knows what his own personal character is. He’s going to be a ‘goodie’ or a ‘baddie’.

Tolkien: Yes, yes, well I, of course, yes, I’m…everyone knows that isn’t generally true. But I had to simplify a little, yes.

Gueroult: That’s why Gollum is so interesting. Because one, you know, he almost repents at one point, doesn’t he, where he sees Frodo?

Tolkien: That is to me the most poignant, in the whole story, the most poignant moment of all, because it’s so terribly true: it’s the good people that do the damage so often. It was Sam’s suspicious faithfulness, which was very much justified, which ruined Gollum. You see that if you go a long, long way in wickedness, then comes your chance, but you can’t therefore demand that it should be made nice and easy at that point. It’s going to be probably very sticky, the last chance, and it was too sticky for Gollum. Because he grew on them, I almost can see Gollum…where I was most criticized by certain people, and where I think I am the most right, is making point of fact that, and I do praise them for seeing it, is that Frodo actually failed.

Gueroult: Now women play very little part indeed in The Lord of the Rings. Éowyn is almost the only woman in the book who shows any sign of sexual awareness at all. Did you deliberately exclude sex from the book?

Tolkien: No, but after all, these are wars and a terrible expedition to the North Pole, so to speak.

Gueroult: But other writers have occasionally allowed their characters to digress [chuckles], if it be digression, in this way.

Tolkien: Surely, there’s no lack of interest, is there…?

Gueroult: Oh, it’s not a case of lack of interest at all.

Tolkien: Wouldn’t you have thought that Galadriel…every character is tempted at some point. Wouldn’t you have thought Galadriel’s temptation and what she says about herself is significant?

Gueroult: Yes, I think so, but it’s always at one remove.

Tolkien: I don’t know how to explain it. I know that…how one reviewer explained it. [chuckling] He said it was written by a man who has never reached puberty [chuckles], and knows nothing about women except for a schoolboy. And all his characters, all the good characters come home, like happy boys safe from the war. I thought it was very rude from a man, as far as I know he’s childless, [chuckling] writing about a man surrounded with children, wife, a daughter, grandchildren. Still, it isn’t that; that’s not the reason, no, because it’s equally untrue, isn’t it, that it’s a happy story? One friend of mine said he only read it in Lent, because it was so hard and bitter.

Gueroult: At what point, I’d like to know, if you can judge at all, did the story take control of you?

Tolkien: Long before I wrote The Hobbit and long before I wrote this, I had constructed this world mythology; it was already in existence. It was offered to the publishers before. This mythology and the Eldar and the Valar, the western paradise and the elves and the dwarves and so on, they don’t arise for the first time in this book; they had already been constructed. There’s nothing in the Appendices, referred to, that has not already been written.

Gueroult: So, you had some sort of scheme on which it was possible to work?

Tolkien: Well, I had immense sagas, yes [unintelligible] it got sucked into it as The Hobbit did itself; as you know, The Hobbit was originally about [these dwarves?], and as soon as it got moving out into the world, it got moving…sucked into it.

Gueroult: So, your characters and your story really took charge. [silence] I say took charge; I don't mean that you were completely under their spell or anything of this sort.

Tolkien: Oh no, no, no, no, no. I don’t wander about dreaming at all, no, [laughs] no, no, no, it isn’t an obsession in any way. A lot of people who have written large things have the same sensation that you have some—it may be a purely psychological delusion—but you have this sensation that…that at this point [ticks pipe] A, B, C, D, or only A, or one of them is right, and you’ve got to wait until you see. Well, of course, there’s no doubt some parts aren’t as good when I’m working on these things. Anyway, there’s no good trying to [laughs] to anticipate, because all the things I try to write ahead of time, just to direct myself, all prove to be no good when you got there. The story actually has to be written backwards as well as forwards.

Gueroult: This is, I thought, probable, yes.

Tolkien: Well, you see, Boromir. Well, he had to be put back. [unintelligible] to a certain point, because he had to be put right back into the end of Book One. [lights match] Of course, I had maps, of course. If you’re going to have a complicated story, you must work to a map, otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards. The moons, I think, finally were the moons and sunset worked out according to what they were in this part of the world in 1942, actually. You must have something…I mean, I’m not a good enough mathematician or astronomer to work out where they might have been 7000, 8000 years ago. As long as they correspond to some real configuration [that others?] would[n’t?] know. Moons are much more tricky to deal with than the suns, of course. But on the whole, I don’t think the moon is full or otherwise in the wrong place.

Gueroult: You began in ’42, did you, to write it?

Tolkien: Oh no, I began as soon as The Hobbit was out—in the ’30s, yes. [shakes matches]

Gueroult: And when did you…it was finally finished just before it was published, in ’54…

Tolkien: I wrote the last…in about 194…9, I should think—I remember I actually wept at the Field of Cormallen, which is…of course, the tears come easier, I think, at the [good?] denouement. But then, of course, there was a tremendous lot of revision. I typed the whole of that work out twice and lots of it many times on a bed in an attic. Because I couldn't afford the, of course, the typing. There’s some mistakes still…and also, well I…amuses me to say, as I suppose, I’m in a position in which it doesn’t matter what people think of me now…some frightful mistakes in grammar…from a Professor of English Language and Lit. are rather shocking.

Gueroult: [chuckling] I hadn't noticed any.

Tolkien: There was one where I used ‘bestrode’ as the past participle of ‘bestride’! [laughs] There were a lot of things like that, yes.

Gueroult: Will you ever correct them in another edition, or…

Tolkien: I have sent in some for correction. There always seem to be new ones cropping up. Yes, there are some…and of course ‘dwarves’ is an easy mistake in grammar. Of course, I’ve tried to cover it up. But it’s just purely the fact that I have a tendency to increase the number of these vestigial plurals in which there’s a change of consonant, like ‘leaf’, ‘leaves’. I tended to make more of them than are now standard. And I found…I really thought ‘dwarf’, ‘dwarves’; ‘wharf’, ‘wharves’, why not?

Gueroult: Did you evolve the languages before you wrote the book?

Tolkien: Oh yes, yes. Well, yes, I evolved them and that sort of thing. Indeed, long before. In fact, they began before my mythology.

Gueroult: For what purpose? Just for fun?

Tolkien: Expressing one’s own tastes. After all, isn’t that what artists do?

Gueroult: Of course, but you see, an artist paints a picture presumably for himself, but occasionally with communication in mind. Had you invented these languages with any sense of communication with other people?

Tolkien: No, but I hoped to find [unintelligible] book [laughs]. The language I invented tried to fit my actual, personal, linguistic, predilectional pleasure. Well, now, obviously, from a history, those two languages have got to be related, though they’re quite different. All you do is you have to posit a purely invented, original form or original soundscape. And then you have to make language A develop certain sound laws and come to be, and certain other ones produce B. And then B relates, however little related they seem, but it will have that sort of feeling.

Gueroult: So, therefore, if you have, for the purposes of the plot, or purposes of some part of the book, to invent a new name for a new character, you consciously say to yourself, ‘In Quenya, this name will be so-and-so, but in Sindarin, his name will be this.’

Tolkien: Yes, you do have that. In the first test, it has to sound a nice name to me, even if I don’t know what it means. But then you, of course, come across this [chuckling] unfortunate fact that if it…it doesn’t always happen that if you then work those same elements with the same meaning into a name, then it doesn’t always come out as a nice name, in spite of that. So, then you have to give him another name, or do something about it. Yes, it’s a minor technical craft, actually.

Gueroult: Well it’s an interesting technical craft, because you do it with equal success when you name unpleasant characters, like orcs. Because all your unpleasant characters are instantly identifiable as unpleasant characters the minute one reads their names.

Tolkien: Yes, I suppose they would. You wouldn’t like anything much of a chap called Uglúk, would you, no.

Gueroult: Yet dwarves, although they have names composed of similarly uncomfortable consonants to the English ear, don’t…the names are not unattractive—immediately they’re attractive. And this seems to me one of the great strengths of the book: amid this enormous conglomeration of names, one doesn’t get lost, at least after the first reading, after the second reading of the book, one doesn’t get lost.

Tolkien: Well it does me [unintelligible] well I’m very glad you told me that because I gave a great deal of trouble. We were [unintelligible], you see. I did try to use the languages, which I did understand, which is, after all, the primary and most important of all cultural [unintelligible]. I tried to use them for their purpose, to characterise. Also, of course, it gives me great pleasure, a good name. I always in the writing, always start with a name. Give me a name and it produces a story, not the other way about, normally.

Gueroult: Of the languages you know, which were the greatest help to you in writing The Lord of the Rings?

Tolkien: [Oh lord?]…yes. Well, because I started trying to invent languages almost at once, the same way that my reading of myth has been disturbed, because I never hardly got though any fairy-stories; I wanted to write by myself.

Gueroult: It’s perhaps an added discipline to trace back, anyway, to sources in a work of this sort. But do you trace in the languages you invented, more to Scandinavia or later things like Middle English, or…

Tolkien: [pause] I don’t know…no. Of the sort of modern day languages, I should say that Welsh has attracted me by its style and sound, more than any other. Even when I first saw on coal trucks, I wanted to know what it was about.

Gueroult: It seems to me that certainly the music of Welsh comes through in the names you've chosen for mountains and for places in general. Do you acknowledge this?

Tolkien: Yes, very much. But a much rarer, very potent influence, on myself has been Finnish.

Gueroult: Do you feel any sense of guilt at all that as a philologist, as a Professor of English Language, with which you were concerned with the factual sources of language, you devoted a large part of your life to a fictional thing?

Tolkien: No. No, I'm sure it actually done the language a lot of good, yes. [laughs] No, no, there’s quite a lot of linguistic wisdom in it. I don’t feel any guilt complex about The Lord of the Rings, though many people have said, ‘Ah, we know what you’ve wasted, wasted the last fourteen years of [unintelligible], you can now get on and complete some of the professional tasks which you’ve neglected’; and so [unintelligible], it was more busy, working at my proper things. [laughs] [unintelligible] for a long while, yes.

Gueroult: Is the book to be considered as an allegory?

Tolkien: No. I dislike allegory, whenever I smell it.

Gueroult: Do you consider the world declining as the Third Age declines in your book? And do you see a Fourth Age for the world at the moment, our world?

Tolkien: A person of my age, you see, is exactly the kind of person who has lived through one of the most quickly changing periods known to history. And that the world is a totally different place now, at a speed…everybody feels that, anybody who lives over seventy begins to feel that. All through history, we see that they do. But surely never been in seventy years so much change.

Gueroult: Oh, surely never, no. I mean, someone doesn’t have to be seventy years old to appreciate this fact.

Tolkien: The world in which I was brought up in as a small child was indefinitely closer to the world of Shakespeare.

Gueroult: There's an autumnal quality throughout the whole of The Lord of the Rings; there’s a sense of continuous change. Each character feels himself to be part of a story that’s forever continuing. In one case a character says the story is continuing but I seem to have dropped out of it. However, everything is declining, and it’s fading, at least towards the end of the Third Age. Every choice tends to the upsetting of some tradition. Now this seems to me to be somewhat like Tennyson’s “the old order changeth, yielding place to new, and God fulfills himself in many ways”. Where is God in The Lord of the Rings?

Tolkien: He's mentioned once or twice.

Gueroult: Is he the One above the Eldar?

Tolkien: The One, yes.

Gueroult: Despite the continuous war between evil, personified in Sauron, and good, you never personalize or personify goodness. Good is there but it’s totally abstract; you don't attempt to ascribe any godship to it, particularly.

Tolkien: No, no, this isn't a dualistic mythology it's based on, no. No, certainly not.

Gueroult: But, I mean, the whole book is nevertheless nothing but the battle between good and evil.

Tolkien: Well that’s, I suppose, actually, a conscious reaction of the war from the stuff that I was brought up on—“The War to End Wars,” that kind of…I couldn’t…which I didn't believe in at the time and I believe in less now.

Gueroult: If I can take this a bit further, I may make my point clearer. In battle, Frodo and Sam call on Galadriel or their native country, Gimli calls on his ancestor’s axe, if I read your appendices correctly, and the Men call only on their swords by name or on their kings or lords. I would expect them to call on their gods. And yet amid thousands of names you don’t name the deities of any the races you've invented, why? Have they no gods as such?

Tolkien: There aren’t any.

Gueroult: I would’ve thought a story of this sort was almost dependent upon an intense believe in some theocratic division, some hierarchy.

Tolkien: There is indeed. That’s where the theocratic hierarchy comes in. The man of the 20th century must of course see that you must have, whether he believes in them or not, you must have gods in a story of this kind. But he can't make himself believe in gods like Thor and Odin, Aphrodite, Zeus, and that kind of thing.

Gueroult: You can’t believe the men in your story would have called on Odin?

Tolkien: I couldn't possibly construct a mythology which had Olympus or Asgard in it on the terms in which the people who’d worshiped those gods believed. God is the supreme, the creator, outside, transcendent. The place of the gods is taken, so well taken that I think it really makes no difference to the ordinary reader, is taken by the angelic spirits created by God, created before the particular time sequence which we call the world, which is called in their language ‘Eä’, ‘that which is’, ‘that which now exists’. Those are the Valar, the Powers. It’s a construction, you see, a mythology in which a large part of the demiurgic of the thing has been handed over to powers which are created therein under The One. It's a bit like, but much more elaborate and more thought out than, C. S. Lewis’s business with his Out of the Silent Planet where we have a demiurgus who is actually in command of the planet Mars. And the idea that Lucifer was originally the one in command of the world, but he fell, and so it was a silent planet [unintelligible] that was the idea; well this is not the same with me.

Gueroult: Yes, yes…so, then you have…in your theocracy, you have an ultimate One, whom you call…

Tolkien: He’s called The One only.

Gueroult: The One only. And then the Valar, who are considered as living in Valinor.

Tolkien: This particular little group of them who moved from other parts to this part because they became interested in it.

Gueroult: In the book, I get the impression you always see power as being physically in a high place. You have a high seat, there’s Orthanc, Meduseld, Barad-dûr, the towers of Minas Tirith, Morgul, and Cirith Ungol. They are always high, physically up. Is power for you always, so to speak, at the top of the mountain or the top of a...

Tolkien: Well that's just a symbol, isn't it? Or no, as a matter of fact it’s just the storytelling—anything you want, towers and so on. You could have them down in the dungeon or underneath; there are as a matter of fact: Morgoth, the prime mover of evil, of whom Sauron was only a petty lieutenant, lives in a dungeon—he must be in a fortress of some kind…not that Valinor has any high towers, just a…

Gueroult: Well that is almost without the world you describe, isn’t it?

Tolkien: It’s in the physical world according to the myth…until the downfall of Atlantis. I’ve had an Atlantis complex in addition to all these other things. And quite independent of that I’ve a permanent dream that I had, you know. Let’s say that the irreductible wave has been one of my nightmares, sometimes coming in over the open country. It always ends by one surrendering oneself when [unintelligible]. It comes in at all kinds of points. Whenever I used to doodle and draw, nearly always a lone figure with a vast oceanic wave coming in. So, of course, I had to write quite an [appendix of?] these Atlantis stories in which I call it Númenor, which means the land of the extreme West, west of Men. Well, this is the fable, you see, since the whole question of the human fall is left off the stage, nicely. It occurred but it is not known since the retrace of these people. They were given this great island. The furthest of all West, not in the divine world, not in the immortal world, to live on. Then, of course, will always come a seemingly meaningless ban, like the fruit of the tree of evil; Lewis used the same thing in his Perelandra. Their ban was they mustn’t sail West. They did, naturally.

Gueroult: Hence the ultimate downfall…

Tolkien: Then it became only intellectual. It lived then only in memory. It lived in time, but not present time. And, of course, Númenor was drowned then the earthly paradise was removed and so then you could then get to sail to America. [In the Third Age?], the world became round. You see it always had been a vast globe. But people can now sail around it... discovered it’s round... that was my solution of the... I always wanted to give a form of Atlantis some universal application. The point is really…I’m sorry there…as they get to it you suddenly see the real colours of the world going down like a bridge. You’re on a line which leads to what was. Of course, I don't know what your theory of time is, but what was, what is, [laughing] whatever had an existence must, still has that same existence, but it’s a…we won’t go, you can’t go in too deeply into those things but they really are sailing back to a world of memory.

Gueroult: In this world which you might have created had you been given the power to do so, had you been one of the Valar, had you been, say, the [mock?] God, would you have created a world which is so solidly feudal as The Lord of the Rings?

Tolkien: Oh yes, very much so, yes, I think the feudal…well, I mean, you mean feudal in the French sense, not in the strict way for landowning?

Gueroult: Oh no, no, no, in the wider sense.

Tolkien: Hierarchical, rather, yes.

Gueroult: Hierarchical, exactly, yes.

Tolkien: Hierarchical, yes, I expect.

Gueroult: I mean that power should descend by a line of kings to their sons.

Tolkien: Oh! The heredity, yes, yes, yes, I don’t know about that. No. It’s a very potent story making and motive thing but…half I would say, it has really worked better than putting any other system and looking at the history the world, one doubts very much. It’s never been worse, at any rate, than the struggle for power that always ensues when you haven’t got some line of descent which can’t be questioned.

Gueroult: You’re wedded to the feudal system, in a sense? I don't mean the medieval feudal system but the idea of power descending through blood or through marriage, or…

Tolkien: Yes, I am rather wedded to those kind of loyalties, because I think, contrary to most people, I think that touching your cap to the squire may be damn bad for the squire, but it's damn good for you.

Gueroult: Do you find a continuing interest in Lord of the Rings by people? Do people still write to you, despite that the book’s been out for 10 years?

Tolkien: Dozens of letters a week, yes. All I can do is keep a secretary to answer them, yes.

Gueroult: Were you surprised at its success?

Tolkien: Nobody’d been more staggered…[chuckling] unless it was possibly Sir Stanley Unwin. I was up at Stanley Unwin’s birthday celebration, and a bookseller came up to me…I don’t usually get greeted with such fervor; he was so delighted that while he’d got [laughing] a copy it'd sell so well it practically kept him going. [laughs] Well, he gets his guinea off the cent, you see?

Gueroult: Almost the last question: do you in fact believe, yourself, not in the context of this book, believe in the sense of straightforward strict belief, in the Eldar or in some form of governing spirits?

Tolkien: Well the Eldar must be distinguished from the Valar. The Eldar are only…

Gueroult: The Valar, I mean. I'm sorry.

Tolkien: Yes…umm… [pause]

Gueroult: Are you in fact a theist?

Tolkien: [emphatically] Oh, I’m a Roman Catholic…devout Roman Catholic, yes, but I don’t know about angelology. Yes, I should’ve thought almost certainly…yes. Certainly.

Gueroult: Well they seem to me to be the saints or the equivalent of the saints.

Tolkien: For theology, in some way, yes; [lights match] they take the place, in this book of the things in which the medieval and old religions you have the gods in the invocation of the saints which are lesser angels, you see; yes, they do. Well, so obviously many people have noticed that praying to the Lady or the Queen of the Stars is most like Roman Catholics in the invocations of Our Lady.

Gueroult: Do you wish to be remembered chiefly by your writings on philology, on other matters, or by The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit?

Tolkien: I shouldn’t have thought there was [chuckles] very much choice in the matter—if I’m remembered at all, it will be by The Lord of the Rings, I take it. I wouldn’t mind the other being remembered, but I’m conscious that they’re small and not very important. Won’t it be rather like the case of Longfellow, won’t it? People remember Longfellow wrote Hiawatha and perhaps one or two other things and quite forget he was a Professor of Modern Languages.

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